(Editor’s Note: This is the first story in a series examining the complexities of the need-blind admissions issue.)

The history of need-blind admissions at Macalester is long, complicated and often disputed.

According to Director of Financial Aid Brian Lindeman, the debate over need-blind admissions has been present since he was a student at Macalester in the late 1980s.

“No one who is here now can remember a time when we were not need-blind,” Lindeman said. “When I was a student here, we were talking about [the issue]. I think that the issue of priorities is one that the college has been wrestling with for a long time.”

According to Chief Investment Officer Craig Aase, the debate has raged for even longer than that. Aase said financial aid has been a “long-running source of budgetary tension.”

Aase said that past tension has not been as visible as it is now and that the college has historically accepted the constraint on its resources that need-blind creates. He added that, because of money spent on financial aid, faculty compensation has been below that of peer institutions and that departmental program budgets were either reduced or held constant in times when financial resources were not available.

“I think [the tension] goes all the way back to the late 1970s,” Aase said, “The price of higher education has gone up faster than families can pay for it. [For that reason], I can’t remember a year when it wasn’t a stressor.”

President Michael McPherson commissioned the Resource Planning Committee (RPC) in 2002 to examine tuition revenue at the college. RPC chair Danny Kaplan said that a need-blind admissions policy was never formally adopted at Macalester. According to Kaplan, an associate professor of mathematics and computer science, need blind admissions is a concept that evolved as Macalester became a more selective, nationally known liberal arts college.

Prior to the 1960s, Macalester practiced a policy of need-blind admission by default because it had to fill as many seats in each entering class as possible. At that time, the college had only regional draw and was significantly less selective than it is today.

When Macalester became more selective, need-blind admissions evolved as a way to attract the best students.

“Every school primarily wants to admit the best students,” Kaplan said. “Most will admit the best without looking at a student’s ability to pay.”

“More selective schools go through an evolutionary process where there are more applicants than seats, and need-blind admissions begins to evolve,” Aase said.

During the 1960s, the Expanded Educational Opportunity program funneled large amounts financial aid and support first to low-income white students and then to domestic students of color in an effort to create more diversity on campus. During this time, President Harry Morgan also created a program that allowed Macalester students to work overseas in the summer and the World Press Institute.

David Lanegran, professor of Geography, described the programs available to students on campus during the 1960s as “having a level of innovation that has not been matched since.”

These initiatives, however, left the college in a financial crisis in the 1970s. According to the RPC report, this crisis ended in the termination of all non-tenured faculty members.

So that the college could continue its effort to recruit top students, donors such as the DeWitt Wallace Foundation stepped in to help finance college operations.

“As the administration and faculty developed programs and recruited students, the college ran a deficit,” Lanegran said. “Donors like Dewitt Wallace stepped in to help cover [the deficit].”

During the 1980s the college was granted rights to dividends from Reader’s Digest stock. The money that the stock promised suddenly catapulted the college into a position in which it could afford to be need blind. It was following this donation that the Board of Trustees strategic planning commission established maintaining need-blind admissions as one of its long-term goals.

Kaplan said he believes that it is important to differentiate between the concept of need-blind admission and a commitment to meeting full financial need. He said the two terms are often used interchangeably, but are not the same thing.

“Even then, people were using the term need-blind to mean meeting full financial aid,” Kaplan said. “People still use it that way.”

A full need policy guarantees that the college will meet the full amount of each accepted student’s demonstrated need; need-blind admissions means that a student’s financial situation has no bearing on whether or not he or she is admitted.

According to Aase, need-blind is an admissions practice and the commitment to meeting full need is a financial aid policy.

According to Kaplan, Macalester began planning how to spend the money from the Reader’s Digest stock before it knew how much money the stock would actually make available. Due in part to the stock not being readily saleable and in part to a downturn in the stock market, the stock from Reader’s Digest did not garner as much money as the college had hoped it would.

Because of Macalester’s policy of averaging the value of the endowment to determine how much it can spend yearly on operating expenses, including financial aid, the college did not feel the effects of the stock market downturn until a few years after it actually occurred. Since the changes in the stock market have persisted for several years, the college is now dealing with a decrease in available spending from the endowment.

Once again Macalester faces a dilemma resulting from increasing demand for financial aid coupled with fewer available funds.

The current practice of need-blind admission applies only to domestic, non-transfer students. International students have always been admitted on a need-aware basis because, on average, they receive more financial aid than domestic students.